Windows XP gets yet another reprieve from Microsoft
David, you can relax..... 
Personally this doesn't bother or effect me in the slightest as I expect to have purchased a new system long before that and I make my OS decision at that time (though I guess I could downgrade to XP Pro
). XP isn't a blood relative, so I would have no problem moving on, but I don't just drop an OS because another has come out. XP had been out for over 2 years before I switched to that on a new system build.
It is mainly an extension only of support for XP SP2 (which was meant to have ended this month) I have SP3 which is on extended support until April 2014.
This weird one is to allow new users who purchase a system with win7 installed to downgrade to XP Professional until Jan 2015. If they extend the support life for new Win7 systems downgrading to XP Pro, then MS would have to pump out security updates for those systems, so I don't know how they would differentiate from old installations, if the user uses the MS technet to manually download security updates.
The way Microsoft is phrasing the new end of life dates for XP is less clear-cut. The Microsoft “Blogging Windows” blog, in a July 12 post, explained it this way:
“(W)e have decided to extend downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional beyond the previously planned end date at Windows 7 SP1. This will help maintain consistency for downgrade rights throughout the Windows 7 lifecycle. As a result, the OEM versions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate will continue to include downgrade rights to the similar versions of Windows Vista or Windows XP Professional. Going forward, businesses can continue to purchase new PCs and utilize end user downgrade rights to Windows XP or Windows Vista until they are ready to use Windows 7.”
So as I though more of a business issue as they are very reluctant to upgrade OSes and not some much one of an extension of the extended support of XP, but that will no doubt be a knock on effect.
All in all, clear as mud
